My MMD Playlist: Two Years of Hatsune Miku on a Loop
Every Miku person has a playlist like this — a slowly growing collection of MMD videos that you half-watch, fully watch, and re-add to the queue at 1 a.m. Mine currently holds about 85 videos, and the newest one dropped two days before I wrote this. Here's a tour of what's in it.
The heart of the list: custom-style Miku renders
The bulk of the playlist is Hatsune Miku in the work of the community's custom-model artists — the style names you'll see everywhere in MMD titles:
- YYB式 (YYB-style) — the workhorse of my list. Bloody Groovy, Whiplash, Overdose, the M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE SHOT! dance, UNDEAD, 驫麤～とりぷるばか～. If a Miku video has "YYB式改変" in the title, it earns a spot.
- Sour式 (Sour-style) — a steady stream of 4K renders:Telephone, MONITORING, Unknown Mother Goose, Ura-Omote Lovers, Music Music, Reversible Campaign.
- つかさ式 / 驫麤式 / ままま式 / msTC風 / どっと式 — the rest of the custom-mesh roster, each with its own look. つかさ式's ARROW in sdPBR is one of my favorites.
What draws me to this stuff: the render quality. The newer entries are all 4K, several at 60fps, with lighting and PBR materials that make a Vocaloid video look like a short film.
Beyond Miku
It's mostly Miku, but the playlist has drifted the way all MMD playlists do:
- Crossover models: Blue Archive's Arona in a frilled swimsuit (HORIZON), Pokémon's Serena doing Ice Cream Magic, KanColle's Kazikaze (Girls), Otonari no Tenshi-sama's Shiina Mahiru, and Oreimo's Ayanokouji Ayase.
- K-pop and J-pop covers: aespa's LEMONADE, TWICE's Whiplash, and picco × Yatsuhashi P's Dirty Look — the latter being the biggest hit on the list at ~189K views.
- Vocaloid originals: the classics that never age — Unknown Mother Goose, yōdore shirazu, VIDEVDA, sýzygy, MONSTER, 劣等上等, 恋愛裁判, ハルジオン, 裏表ラバーズ.
Who's making it
The playlist is a map of the MMD scene's YouTube side: Anime Sekai and NonERax000 for steady 4K Miku output, kamami for msTC-style edits, くーこ (cuko) for 4K/60fps Demon Lord and SPiCa, ハウツー (HowTo) for the crossover models, and ゆずポン酢MMD for the game-collab stuff. HIMEHINA's Frankenstein's Monster dance video is the outlier that snuck in because it was too good to pass up.
Why it matters to me
This playlist and my other projects here — Mate Engine research, the Miku-themed site itself — are the same hobby from different angles. MMD is the craft: modeling, rigging, dancing a virtual character on screen. Mate Engine and its ilk are the same idea packaged as a desktop companion. The playlist is where I watch that craft at its best, and the rest of this site is where I figure out how to run it on my own machine.
The full playlist, on YouTube — and it will keep growing.